Dorian Leigh(Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker),
(born April 23, 1917, San Antonio, Texas—died July 7, 2008, Falls Church, Va.), American fashion model who dominated the 1940s and ’50s fashion scene, with appearances on more than 50 magazine covers (including 7 for Vogue in 1946 alone) and in a 1952 advertising campaign for Revlon cosmetics; she was widely considered the first supermodel, though the publicity surrounding her stormy personal life sometimes rivaled that of her career. Leigh majored in English at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, Va., and then studied mathematics and engineering at New York University before doing mechanical drafting for the U.S. Navy and for the Eastern Aircraft Corp., designing aircraft wings. At the age of 27, while working as an advertising copywriter in New York City, she applied to be a model at Harry Conover Agency, which referred her to Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland featured her on the magazine’s cover in June 1944. Leigh later joined Eileen Ford’s esteemed modeling agency on the condition that her much younger sister—the future supermodel Suzy Parker—be hired as well, sight unseen. At age 40, Leigh, with Ford, opened Paris’s first modeling agency. Leigh later trained as a chef, opened a restaurant, and wrote two cookbooks as well as an autobiography, The Girl Who Had Everything (1980).

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.